Mike Rorty Builds His Own Stress Test

Two days ago, I echoed Felix Salmon'scomplaint that the stress tests omitted the "baseline scenario" data, which made it impossible for analysts to use the estimates to conduct their own models.

Well, almost impossible.

Mike Rorty,employing statistical ninjery that I don't even want to try and describe, has built his own model. It's a bit crude, but it's far and away the best I've seen. And its results are striking. Imagine that unemployment in 2010 is not 10.3 percent, as the stress test's "adverse scenario" predicted, but 12.5 percent. What happens to the banks?

For most of them, precious little. But a few of them fall deep, deep, deep into the red. This graph tells the story:

Yikes. Bank of America is the real shocker here: They require an extra $100 billion in cash. And it's very hard to imagine them raising that on the private market.